The Difficulties of Change

Writing now is so common now that we rarely think about a time when it was a sign of high social or intellectual status, something that had to be sought after.

The shift from orality to written knowledge was not a sudden change. In fact, in most cultures, it probably took many years after the invention of written language for their knowledge systems to adapt to the new medium.

Why was this? the initial difficulty of procuring the knowledge needed to communicate through literacy may have been simply because it was a much more difficult medium. Anyone can learn to talk, under normal circumstances. But writing? In these times it was a much different story.

(Much of the information I used in researching this topic came from a paper title "From Clay Tablets to Canon: the Story of the Formation of Scripture", written by Kerry Muhlestein, a professor of ancient scripture here at BYU and my interviewee from my previous post.)

In Egypt specifically, as well as in other regions that made use of logographic or symbolic rather than phonemic characters, the writing system itself was a hindrance to the spread of this new form of knowledge. To quote Dr. Muhlestein, "The greatest prohibition in writing was the writing system itself. In order to write proficiently with either the hieroglyphic or cuneiform script, one had to master thousands of signs" (Muhlestein).

Nowadays, even young children can write many of the signs of our alphabet. But hieroglyphics were much more difficult to master.

A picture of Hieroglyphics, showing a wide range of characters and symbols.

This meant that training a scribe was on the level of training a bard, like we discussed in class - long, labor intensive, and not something just anyone would up and do one day. It was your occupation, along with classes in governmental workings and mathematics, since no other people could write in order to perform the needed functions (Muhlestein). The Rhind papyrus shows a great example of Ancient Egyptain mathematics, compiled, and actually copied from an even older source, by a scribe named Ahmes (source).

Here are two pictures of part of the Rhind Papyrus, clearly showing geometry problems:

Even when there was an opportunity for someone to attend a school of writing, "Generally only the elite could afford to send their children to a scribal school, and many of these probably dropped out" (Muhlestein) because of the strict regimens of the ancient Egyptian schools, which proclaimed to their students, "Do not spend a day in idleness or you will be beaten" (Adolf Erman, ed., The Ancient Egyptians: A Sourcebook of Their Writings (New York:Harper and Row, 1966), 189., as cited by Dr. Muhlestein). This of course further limited the spread of writing, for even those with the chance to learn the art may have been discouraged by the harsh regimen.

There is another aspect that may have been even more influential in slowing the shift from oral to written knowledge systems among the common people. This was the idea that oral communication still held the most authority in the world of communication and learning, and written words were just to keep records of these spoken transactions or decrees, as well as important events or conquests and so on.

"The primary purpose of a scribe was to keep records, not to create great literary works. While some certainly did create such works, the mindset of the societies and their schools was that scribes were primarily functional. In such societies, the locus of authoritative ideas lay in the spoken word, or oral tradition, not the written word" (Muhlestein).

In fact, the verb in Hebrew that is now translated as 'to read' originally meant to 'call out' or 'proclaim' (Francis Brown, S. R. Driver, and Charles A. Briggs, eds., A Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament (London: Oxford University Press, 1906), 894–97. As cited by Dr. Muhlestein).

I apologize for how lengthy this post is becoming, but there's so much pertinent information in this article and elsewhere that I am still going to have to cut it shorter than I could go, just for the sake of my group.

To conclude, the shift from oral to written knowledge systems was not as smooth or speedy as the invention of writing itself - which was itself not a simple thing. The process took time, years of it in many cases, until a greater number of people were able to communicate through writing, and therefore preserve and pass down knowledge through this method for anyone to use. Until then, oral traditions would still hold sway in many areas.

Sources:

Muhlestein, Kerry. “From Clay Tablets to Canon: the Story of the Formation of Scripture”. 2006.